UKRN Daily Power Stat For Cheltenham

We’re onto the third day of the horse racing festival extravaganza and what a glorious two days it has been so far. With Mullins dominating the first day and Sprinter Sacre regaining his title yesterday it’s been an emotional roller coaster for trainers, jockeys, bookies and punters alike. You can’t beat it win or lose!

With the likes of Vautour, Thistlecrack and Limini looking to be fairly solid bankers and getting the bookies twitching what about the notoriously difficult handicaps of the day?

We’ve got three big field handicaps to deal with on day three but the one I wanted to look at is the Pertemps. A 24 runner conundrum over 2 miles 7 furlongs and 12 hurdles to take.

Where do we start!

Statistics and trends is the way for me and this is where we’re headed today as we look at this highly competitive race.

With handicaps I usually start by looking at the stats around trainers and jockeys as a starting point. However with the low strike rates of these type of stats in the festival handicaps it’s almost impossible to rule anyone out.

We start then with trends. A profile if you like of what previous winners have looked like. If we can find consistent similarities between previous winners it can give us a good starting point to start finding our first eliminations. From there we can then start to look for our qualifiers and hopefully find the winner from there.

So what has the Pertemps winner looked like over the years….

• 55% of winners have won last time out
• 8 year olds or older have won the last 7 out of 10 renewals
• 7 to 9 year olds have won more than 50% in the last 18 years
• Only 1 five year old has won this in the last 40 years
• Over 80% of winners have been double figure odds

I use an excel sheet to go through these stats and start eliminating those horses that fall outside of the above criteria –

You’ll see in the image below that I put a cross in the TRENDS box for those that do not fit the criteria and award a “point” for those that do. So if a horse fits three of the trends then they get a 3 in the TRENDS box and so on –

So those with a cross have now been eliminated from my analysis.

By using the filter button at the top of the excel sheet I can now remove these from my sheet.

We have now removed five horses but there are still 19 runners to analyse.

We now move through the key statistics that relate to how a horse has fared on the going, distance and course. We award 1 point to each time a horse has won over these three elements.

I have now added the totals of both the trends and the three elements of form to the sheet and this effectively gives me a rating of how the horse fits into the race.

The totals at the bottom can be ignored as this what I use to price up a race but when we’re betting at the festival we need to concentrate more on finding the winner as opposed to value.

I now select those horses that have a rating of 5 or above as my main qualifiers. This leaves me with –

• Tagliatelle
• If In Doubt
• Kilfinichen Bay
• Saddlers Encore
• Rolling Maul

Usually then we would then asses the form and go about pricing a tissue up but this method works perfectly well on its own and has found me many a festival winner in the past. I will now go about dutching these qualifiers as you’ll see in below –

• Tagliatelle @ 16/1
• If In Doubt @ 12/1
• Kilfinichen Bay @ 50/1
• Saddlers Encore @ 18/1
• Rolling Maul @ 50/1

If you head over to http://www.oddschecker.com/betting-tools/dutching-calculator

You’ll see I’ve entered the odds as decimal and this gives me the correct stakes to yield the same profit no matter what happens.

This gives me just short of 7/2 about my five selections and I will also play around with having a few forecasts and tricasts to add to the fun.

Remember I’m not telling everyone to back these selections, it is merely to show you how I quickly breakdown a massive field and find my qualifiers. It’s great fun, keeps it simple and you’d be surprised how often it return great dividends.

Any questions please leave a comment below and have a great two days of the festival 🙂

Eddie Lloyd